000 02253naa a2200169uu 4500
001 5111115000610
003 OSt
005 20190211160234.0
008 051111s2005 xx ||||gr |0|| 0 eng d
100 1 _aMCDAVID, James C
_96919
245 1 0 _aThe impacts of amalgamation on police services in the Halifax Regional Municipality
260 _aToronto :
_bIPAC,
_cWinter 2002
520 3 _aOn 1 April 1996, the Nova Scotia government amalgamated the Town of Bedford, the cities of Dartmouth and Halifax and Halifax County to create the Halifax Regional Municipality. The Halifax amalgamation is one in a series of such mergers that have happened recently in Ontario, Quebec and the Atlantic Provinces. This study compares the costs, resources, service levels, crime rates, workloads and citizen perceptions of police services before and after amalgamation. The findings suggest that, overall, amalgamation of police services in the Halifax region is associated with higher costs (in real-dollar terms), lower numbers of sworn officers, lower service levels, no real change in crime rates, and higher workloads for sworn officers. The findings from three citizen surveys that compare perceptions before and after amalgamation indicate that when the comparisons are focused on persons who actually called the police in 1997 and 1999, nearly thirty-two per cent of those surveyed in 1997 felt that police services had gotten worse since amalgamation, and nearly twenty-five per cent felt the same way in 1999. In 1995, thirty-nine per cent of survey respondents expected services to get worse with amalgamation. Claims about the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of amalgamations have tended to rest on evidence that is generally inadequate to assess the actual consequences of this kind of organizational change. The current study suggests that when predictions are tested, there is a considerable gap between the rhetoric and what actually happens when police departments are amalgamated in an urban setting
773 0 8 _tCanadian Public Administration : the journal of the Institute of Public Administration of Canada
_g45, p. 538-565
_dToronto : IPAC, Winter 2002
_xISSN 008-4840
_w
942 _cS
998 _a20051111
_b1500^b
_cTiago
999 _aConvertido do Formato PHL
_bPHL2MARC21 1.1
_c14074
_d14074
041 _aeng